A laboratory in Libourne, Gironde, announces that it has developed a vaccine against a severe form of avian flu. A breakthrough that would reduce the massive slaughter of ducks, the desperation of farmers, and perhaps prevent the next deadly flu pandemic. In the meantime, “bio-security” measures remain in place.
According to our colleagues from France Blue, the Ceva Animal Health laboratory, announces that it has developed a vaccine against bird flu that would be 100% effective. A major advance that has been awaited for years, but which will not however solve all the problems and will not completely eliminate “biosafety” measures.
A new vaccine against an avian influenza virus
Carried out between December 2016 and summer 2017, the vaccine tests against the avian influenza virus H5N8, the most pathogenic strain, would be 100% positive according to the laboratory. This would allow the vaccinated duck not to have the disease and above all not to transmit it… and therefore to avoid the massive slaughter of ducks that we have observed for several years, slaughter which devastates the farms and ruins the breeders.
However, this vaccine only works against the H5N8 strain, which is admittedly the most pathogenic and the most contagious, but not against other strains of avian influenza virus. However, when it comes to bird flu, it’s the same as with human flu: each year the virus changes. We must therefore be able to adapt to the next virus.
There is still a lot of work to do before the vaccine is approved, but the lead is nevertheless promising. The end of the “biosecurity” measures is therefore not immediately and the slaughter of duck and chicken farms will probably continue for some time.
The specter of the “Spanish flu”
Why these massacres of ducks which affect farmers who are already in a precarious situation? Quite simply because there remains in the minds of scientists the sad memory of the Spanish flu of 1918, which officially killed 20 million and over 40 million unofficially.
Scientists consider that these farms are the secret bases of the worst nature is preparing: “THE” virus of the century. Because it is not bird flu that terrorizes infectious disease specialists today, but rather the potential and diabolical marriage between the virus of birds (like ducks) and that of humans to produce the perfect killer of 1918 : the bird flu virus, a killing machine that can reappear in humans at any time.
A mix of genres
The influenza virus travels and likes to mix with other nearby viruses. Every year a new winter flu virus emerges, not much different, but not quite the same, which results in an epidemic. But if one day the bird flu virus meets the human flu virus, and manages to unite with it as happened in 1918, it results in a virus unknown to human defense systems, the immune system and a massive infection with a lightning death but however not fast enough for the killer virus to have time to spread to the whole planet and create a “pandemic”, that is to say a generalized epidemic.
A threesome
Science fiction? Alas no. These weddings are, it seems, happening with a wedding witness … a pig! It is in fact by passing through the intermediary of the pig, an organism similar to that of humans, that the virus learns to colonize and destroy us. It is the pig that can be contaminated with both avian and human viruses at the same time that lethal mixing can occur. His apprenticeship finished, all that remains is for this virus to undertake its deadly world tour.
A scenario registered according to the WHO
A scenario that the World Health Organization (WHO) has feared for years. The forecasts, if it comes true, are in the event of a pandemic, several hundred thousand deaths just for our country. It is, the WHO which says it. Scientists who rather have the reputation of using the tongue of the woods. Their frankness is now chilling.
It is true that for a breeder who devotes his life and his hobbies to his breeding, often earning the minimum subsistence, the death sentence against all the animals on his farm is a tragedy.
This is the whole point of this new vaccine: avoiding contamination of ducks to avoid not only their mass slaughter, but also perhaps the next deadly pandemic.
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